


Valentine's Fray

by talefeathers



Series: Valentine's Days [4]
Category: Romeo And Juliet - All Media Types, Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Asexual Character, Asexuality, Car Accidents, DUI, Drunk Driving, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Suicide Pact, Trauma, Underage Drinking, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 03:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13673739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talefeathers/pseuds/talefeathers
Summary: On his 18th birthday, Valentine thinks he is finally done running from his past. When Rosaline tells him of a thwarted suicide pact made by two freshmen comparing themselves to Romeo and Juliet, however, he can't seem to get away fast enough. He and Rosaline hop into Mercutio's old Thunderbird and try to leave Verona behind, but they discover too late that their baggage has traveled with them.





	Valentine's Fray

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate Title: Valentine's No Good Dirty Rotten Very Bad Day
> 
> Thank you to everyone who endured my constant bitching as I undertook this, the longest and almost certainly the final Valentine's Day. Valentine and I have done a lot of growing up in four years, and I really hope it shows.

Before he reached his homeroom class, Valentine could tell that something had happened.

He could tell because usually his ten-dollar earbuds were only partially successful when it came to tuning out the morning cacophony of West Veneto High as he shuffled his way to his locker, but this morning they were doing an uncharacteristically fine job. He removed one of them once he reached his destination, furrowing his brow as he listened. For the first time in three years, the sounds of the hallway were muffled by murmurs.

Valentine’s stomach clenched, but he pretended not to notice it, popping his locker open and dumping a backpack full of AP textbooks into it.

“Hey.”

Valentine jumped at Rosaline’s sudden greeting, loud amid the sea of silence. She gave him an apologetic smile in his periphery.

“Sorry,” she said. “Are we on for --?”

“What happened?” Valentine cut across her.

“What?” she chirped, a bit too quickly.

Valentine gave her a withering look, and she sighed.

“Look, I’ll tell you later,” she assured him. “Are we on for the birthday drive or what?”

“I told you, I can’t. I have that AP Lang test sixth period, and I feel like dogshit anyway.” He pointed at his face as he said this, knowing from his two-minute encounter with the mirror this morning that his sleepless night was showing. “Tell me now.”

“You said yesterday that you might change your mind,” Rosaline reminded him, nearly pleading.

“ _Tell_ me, Rosaline,” Valentine said.

Rosaline groaned and rolled her eyes.

“Shit. Fine, okay. Look, we should --” She took his hand. “I don’t want to talk about it here in the middle of everybody.”

“I gotta tell you, right off the bat that makes me feel fucking awesome,” Valentine replied dryly, but he allowed himself to be pulled down the hall, only barely remembering to shut his locker behind him.

\---

“Okay,” Rosaline exhaled finally.

She’d situated them in the storage closet in the back of the classroom where Newspaper was held, affectionately referred to by the Newspaper kids as The Dungeon. Valentine considered for a moment what any peers who had seen them pass would think they were up to in here, then pushed the thought away, mildly nauseated.

“I just. Didn’t want people staring,” Rosaline explained.

“Yeah, they’re not gonna stare now,” Valentine grumbled, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. “For Christ’s sake, Rose, what _happened?_ ”

“Okay! Okay.” Rosaline closed her eyes and seemed to center herself before opening them and beginning to talk. “So I guess there were these two freshmen, and they, like, wanted to be together or whatever. And the one girl’s parents, like, freaked out on her, I guess, and told her she could never talk to this other kid again, and so they, like.”

Rosaline stumbled in spite of herself.

“They made a suicide pact.”

Valentine could feel himself growing wearier, as if he were aging on the spot -- could feel his very soul attempting to sink into the floor beneath him.

“One of their friends snitched on them before they could go through with it,” Rosaline assured him hurriedly. “They’re, you know. They’re both fine and everything. Like, all things considered. But the thing is that they were gonna do it at midnight, because of, you know. It being Valentine’s Day and all. You know.” She gave a half-hearted smile. “The drama of it, right?”

Valentine couldn’t return her attempt at levity -- couldn’t do much of anything except contemplate lying facedown on The Dungeon’s dusty floor.

“Anyway,” Rosaline continued. “The main thing everyone’s talking about is how in their, like. Suicide note or whatever, I guess they compared themselves to Juliet and Romeo.”

This she said quickly, as if to get it over with, but Valentine still heard the bit of emotion that snagged on her cousin’s name. She tried to smile again, but it was more of a grimace this time.

“The news is saying it was like a copycat thing,” she said.

Valentine was quiet for a long moment, his sleep-deprived brain chugging through everything he’d heard like a 10-year-old Dell laptop.

“They died in the summer,” he said finally, unable to chug past that one simple fact. “Fuck Valentine’s Day; it’s shitty enough with all the regular sexual tension and candy heart bullshit. Now people wanna make it about -- about -- they died in the _summer._ ”

“I know,” Rosaline said. “That’s kind of why I asked about the drive again, to be honest, I just.” She pulled her silky black curls over one shoulder and ran her fingers nervously through them. “I don’t want to hear everyone talking about them again.”

Valentine closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose, pushing his own curls (not silky black but dirty blond) back with both hands and trying to loosen the knot that had tightened in his chest. He reminded himself that he could not skip his AP Lang test. He was barely holding onto a B in the class; he couldn’t afford many more test-sized knocks to his grade.

And then he thought, unprompted, of something Mercutio had said to him a lifetime ago.

“If he doesn’t answer that challenge, he’s gonna get himself jumped,” he’d said, stuffing their uncle’s Ruger into his jeans. “Sometimes I swear I exist just to save Romeo from himself.”

When Valentine opened his eyes again, his expression was blank.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Meet me in the senior lot in ten minutes.”

\---

They ended up at the lake.

In accordance with the yearly tradition, Rosaline chose a direction at random each time Valentine reached a stop light using an app on her phone. Valentine was blaring the local Top 40 station in the spirit of this same tradition, but neither of them really felt like singing along. When his eye caught on an exit that would lead them toward Lake Garda, Val once again said “Fuck it” and crossed three lanes to take it.

The beach was empty, it being the middle of the week and also 25 degrees before windchill, so they parked as close to the water as the parking lot would allow.

“We should have grabbed some booze,” Rosaline reflected as she climbed out of the passenger seat.

“We should have grabbed some firewood,” Valentine grumbled, pulling his coat more tightly around him. “There’s booze in the back, though.”

Rosaline popped the trunk of Mercutio’s 1978 Trans Am, which, sure enough, held an unopened six-pack and a mostly full bottle of whiskey.

“When did you get this?” she asked.

“There’s always booze back there,” Valentine replied. “I think it grows in there, like a fungus.”

Rosaline snorted a laugh as she continued digging around the trunk. Valentine’s three-year reluctance to clear it out in any meaningful way yielded two pillows and a large fleece blanket -- all of which smelled faintly of cigarette smoke -- as well as, miraculously, a nearly full box of s’mores flavored Pop-Tarts and a pack of well-loved playing cards.

“Right on,” she said, tossing each of these things to Valentine before grabbing the alcohol herself. “Let’s get this party started, birthday boy.”

\---

They didn’t begin drinking right away, as it was barely 10 AM once they got settled in the sand, and when they did begin they began modestly, each nursing a beer through a few hands of rummy while Bastille played softly from Valentine’s phone and waves whispered along from the shore. As the day began to warm and they began to loosen up they moved from beer and rummy to whiskey and poker (the “strip” variety of which it was still far too cold to play, despite Rosaline’s teasing threats). Eventually it was just whiskey and the two of them lying side by side on Mercutio’s blanket, staring dazedly into the sky.

A long moment of silence stretched between them, and Valentine was trying not to let the familiar scent of the fleece beneath them curl a lump into his throat when Rosaline spoke up.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Valentine blinked an itch from his eyes before turning to look at her, frowning when his brain seemed to take a few seconds to catch up with his eyes. Too much whiskey.

“Sorry for what?” he asked.

“This blows,” she said.

“It was my idea,” Valentine chuckled. “The lake part, anyway. I probably could have found something cooler if I’d kept driving.”

“I guess,” she said. She fell silent again, and Valentine turned his eyes (and, a second or two later, his brain) back up to the gray February sky above him, trying not to inhale too deeply.

“It’s just,” Rosaline eventually continued, “the whole point of coming out here was so we wouldn’t have to think about it, you know? But I can’t seem to fucking stop.”

She didn’t have to specify what “it” was, but she did anyway.

“It was the worst day of my life,” Rosaline said. “And it almost happened all the fuck over again. Someone tried to make a _copy_ of it.”

Valentine nodded, swallowing hard, thinking again of Mercutio. Trying again not to find him in the fabric. If Mercutio had been able to save Romeo from himself the way _these_ kids had been saved --

Rosaline turned with a huff to rest her head on Valentine’s shoulder, draping an arm across his chest. His heart stalled like an engine that wouldn’t turn over as he felt, all at once, how starved he had been for casual touch in the years since his brother had tousled his hair, or nudged at his arm, or looped him into a hug. He had grieved for so much and for so long, but somehow this physical absence had snuck by him, and now it tore through him like a bullet.

Hot tears slid from his eyes before his brain had time to stop them.

Then Rosaline was kissing him.

She caught his tears on his cheeks with her lips before pressing them to his, and the grief roiling within him curdled into a nauseous species of anxiety. He turned his head away from her, and the world tilted sickeningly after him.

“Um,” he said.

“No, sorry,” Rosaline said, pulling away from him and sitting up. “That was stupid. _Fuck._ ”

“It’s just that I’m not --” Valentine’s stomach churned. “I mean, I just don’t really --”

“No, no, I totally get it,” Rosaline said. “I guess I just didn’t want to assume.”

“I --” Valentine’s brain did another impression of a dying laptop, grinding and stuttering. “What?”

“That you were, you know. Like your brother. Gay.”

Valentine’s stomach lurched again, and this time anger flared blindly in his chest.

“I’m not,” he said. “It’s not fucking _hereditary._ ”

“That’s not what I --”

“I’m not anything,” Valentine continued. “I’m. I mean I just don’t.” He grimaced. He knew what he was, but he hated the word “asexual” -- hated the clinical way that it sounded. But nobody fucking knew what “ace” meant without the crash course, so he fumbled around it instead. “I just don’t like people like that. In that way. At all.”

Rosaline didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Oh,” she managed at last. Her tone dipped in a way that could have meant nothing. It also could have meant disbelief, or worse, disgust. “So that’s like a. Thing?”

“No, I fucking made it up,” Valentine spat.

“Unclench, Val,” Rosaline said, rolling her eyes. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what exactly the fuck did you mean, Rose?” Valentine said, pushing himself up so he sat beside her.

“Christ, will you chill out?” Rosaline said. “I only meant I’ve never heard of that, of people just like. Not being into people.”

“And just because you’ve never heard of it it’s not a thing.”

“Again, that’s not what I fucking said -- where the hell are you going?”

Valentine had clambered to his feet and was now sliding a bit in the sand as he stumbled his way to the Trans Am.

“I can’t fucking. Do this right now. I’m going home.”

“You can’t fucking drive, asshole, you’re blitzed,” Rosaline called after him, but Val kept walking.

“ _Valentine!_ ” she shouted as he fumbled with the driver’s side door handle, but he didn’t so much as flinch, yanking the door open with a grunt.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do, then, you prick?” Rosaline roared as he dug for the keys in his pocket, and even through the window Val could hear that her voice was ragged with rage. “You’re just gonna fucking leave me here with your -- your -- shitty-ass Pop-Tarts? Fuck you, Valentine. _Fuck you!_ You know what? I hope you fucking --!”

He didn’t get to hear what she hoped he’d do as he jammed the keys into the ignition and gunned the engine. He didn’t bother to scrub the tears from his eyes before peeling out of the parking lot and into the trees surrounding Lake Garda.

He wasn’t yet back on the highway when the Trans Am’s wheels began to spin uselessly beneath him and the car began to glide, unbidden, toward the center of the road.

"Shit," he muttered, a dull burst of panic filling his chest as he realized he must have hit some ice. He blinked hard, trying to remember anything at all about what he was supposed to do before realizing that, once again, his body was moving ahead of his brain. His hands had jerked the steering wheel to the right, and the forest now rushed up to envelop him in a screaming metal embrace.

\---

There was silence for a long time. Then, from the silence, a voice. Mercutio’s.

“Val,” he said.

And Valentine woke up.

“Cue?” he croaked.

He was answered by the steady beeping of a heart monitor and the gruff voice of his uncle.

“‘Fraid not, kiddo,” Escalus said.

Valentine opened his eyes, then closed them again almost immediately against the searing white of fluorescent lights. A deep pain pulsed within his skull, and his midsection felt as if it was being pressed beneath slabs of stone.

“How are you feeling?” Escalus asked.

Valentine didn’t answer, instead focusing on slowly reopening his eyes and trying to orient himself past the smell of disinfectant and the feeling that his head was going to explode. His uncle sat to his right, dwarfing his little waiting room chair with his girth. He looked about as harried as Val had ever seen him, clothing disheveled and hair mussed with worry.

“Did I hurt anybody?” Valentine asked. “I didn’t -- I didn’t see anyone, but --”

Escalus gently took one of Valentine’s hands. Valentine began to cry.

“You didn’t hurt anyone,” Escalus assured him softly as he ran a thumb over his nephew’s knuckles. “ _You’re_ pretty banged up. Cracked your head pretty good on the steering wheel and broke a couple of ribs. And you scared the hell out of me. But no, you didn’t hurt anyone.”

“I’m sorry,” Valentine sobbed, and once he said it he couldn’t seem to stop. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Escalus said, his own voice beginning to waver. “I mean, you’re more grounded than you’ve ever been in your life,” he continued, and Valentine’s next sob was part chuckle. Then Escalus tightened his hold on Valentine’s hand. “But I’m glad you’re here for me to ground.”

“I’m sorry,” Valentine said again, sniffling and scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of his free hand. “Mercutio was enough of a fuck-up; you don’t need me to be one, too.”

Escalus looked at him for a long moment, then, his expression some inscrutable mingling of bafflement and sorrow.

“Valentine,” he said finally, “I’d never trade you or your brother for anything.” He gave a thin smile. “Fuck-ups or not.”

Valentine smiled back as best he could, swallowing against a lump in his throat.

“Well,” he said, almost sounding like himself again, if a bit congested. “Sounds like maybe you’re a little fucked up, too, then.”

That made Escalus laugh.

“That would explain a lot,” he conceded.

Valentine exhaled and leaned back against his pillow, closing his eyes again briefly.

“Is Rosaline around?” he asked after a moment.

“She is,” Escalus nodded. “You want me to go get her?”

“Yeah,” Valentine said. “Yeah, I’ve got more apologizing to do.”

\---

Rosaline did not sit in the chair Escalus had left vacant, instead standing at an awkward distance from where Valentine lay, as if he were a wild animal that might strike out her if she got too close. Her makeup had smeared into raccoonish smudges around each bloodshot eye, and she kept her arms crossed over her chest.

“Hey,” Valentine said when it became apparent that she was not going to make the first move.

“Hey,” Rosaline murmured in reply.

“I’m sorry for being an asshole,” Valentine said.

Rosaline shrugged.

“I was an asshole, too,” she said. “We both had a lot of shit going on, and we dealt with it like fucking amateurs.”

Valentine huffed a laugh.

“You can say that again,” he said. “You’d think we’d be pros by now.”

“I mean, I guess we kind of are,” Rosaline said. “Pros at dealing with shit poorly, anyway.”

“Practice makes perfect,” Valentine agreed before turning solemn again. “Still, though. I am sorry.”

“I am, too,” Rosaline said, meeting his eyes for the first time since she'd entered. “And I’m really glad you’re okay, Val.”

Blood rushed hot into Valentine's cheeks. For a long moment, there was silence.

“So, next year,” Valentine said at last, clearing his throat when his voice came out hoarse. “Barring any more acutely triggering local news stories, do you wanna, like. Do something normal for fucking once?”

Rosaline burst like a spark into a single, clear laugh.

“Yes, oh my God,” she said, moving finally to sit down beside him. “Like watch a movie or something?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Valentine agreed, grinning. “One where nobody dies and they all get married at the end.”

Rosaline laughed again, and this time Valentine couldn’t help but join her.

“Sounds like a plan, birthday boy,” she said, reaching to give his hand an affectionate little squeeze. “Sounds like a fucking plan.”


End file.
